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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Week 11, and my 21-day challenge

All right. Time to get my ass in gear. These last two weeks have been so ridiculous on my part! Screw up after screw up. So I'm trying something new, to re-invigorate myself, as I feel like I've hit a large rut. I haven't weighed myself in a while because I've been staying at my mom's, as mentioned. I've dealt with so much stress the past couple weeks, and it's time to face it head on instead of hiding.

Work is a big thing, as always. I am finally getting used to my new role, but it is leaving every single one of the people on my team completely, utterly exhausted. I have never seen us so zombie-like! I hadn't thought it was possible to work harder than we already were, but it feels like double-time now. I've never, ever had a workload that was possible to keep up with (luckily my bosses have always been understanding of this and know that I have always done the work that should be done by two full-time people rather than one, so I always get positive feedback) and it's been frustrating to just NEVER be caught up, ever. I'm not helping this by staying up super late, drinking alcohol which screws with my sleep, and drinking way too much caffeine to combat the exhaustion. I've been staying at my mom's, as mentioned, to cat-sit, and it's been really hard to not have my Wii or my aerobics step. This means that the workouts I planned to do are not the ones that I actually LIKE to do. I ended up skipping much of those. I still squeezed in 150 or so fitness minutes, but the food I ate defeated all of that, really.

On the positive side, I've been way more social the past couple weeks than I have been previously, which makes me happy, but it also means going out for food and drinks. I went out to eat FIVE times in one week -- out for sushi with one of my best friends and her fiance, then the same night went to Chile's and then a club (drinks) with my friend Jeff who I haven't seen in a long time, with my dad to Applebee's on Thursday night, with my coworkers to a bar on Friday night (drinks + mozzarella sticks + French fries), and to a Mexican restaurant with my friend (fajitas and margaritas) last night. WOW! I picked decent options for sushi and Applebees and Chile's (really no excuse as all the nutritional info was available) but again, pretty much defeated the purpose when paired with alcohol which I'm sure had more calories than the food itself!

I then, as mentioned, had computer troubles and it ended up costing me a grand total of $920 to fix it. UGH! Total ripoff. I have SparkPeople on my phone but it was really hard for me to track. It was such a pain to try to manually enter all these foods on my phone and I just got frustrated and basically gave up.

I moved most of my stuff back into my condo today as my mom comes back from Florida tomorrow. It will be SO nice to be back in my own place with all my stuff. I've been really anxious/depressed here, probably because I grew up in this place (always hard to go home, isn't it?) I've stopped there a couple times to pick stuff up but haven't spent any extended time there in a long time.

I think I let myself slack off a LOT after I'd seen that I'd lost 15 lbs. I also haven't been able to hold myself accountable because I haven't weighed in in forever since I don't have a scale here. March is also a really difficult month for me (won't go into detail since this is such a public blog, but I tend to be a lot more emotional/stressed out in March). Part of me was thinking about starting some new goals starting April 1st, but then I thought, why wait til then? I don't want to suffer through March. I want to be proactive and I want to fight it.

I have 21 days before April begins. They say it takes 21 days to make a habit. So starting today, I am making myself my own little challenge. It isn't a whole lot different than my general goals, but I want to stick with these pretty strictly for at LEAST 21 days and I want to note the differences I feel.

My 21-Day Spring Challenge
1. Stick within my calorie range every single day for 21 days. Often I let myself slack 1 or 2 days a week and then I really am just taking two steps back because I go too overboard rather than just allowing myself to go a couple hundred calories over.
2. Work out at least 150 minutes per week for the next 3 weeks. My absolute minimum has been 90 minutes, which is pretty sad, so I'm upping it by an hour. I think this goal should be pretty easy for me, as I've been very consistent in doing my minimum of 90 minutes/week and I usually hit 150 minutes anyway.
3. Not a drop of alcohol. It's really derailing my efforts! I usually have a few drinks a week, typically at my dad's or with my friends. I'm just going to pass on this for a while. I think it will make me feel a lot better emotionally. Hangovers are NOT my friends! Even if I don't drink much and am not hungover, I still feel sluggish, and I know that alcohol is pretty much just poison.

That's it. Not hard, right? I just want to be CONSISTENT.

I do have positive things to look forward to, too. I get March 23rd off, and I have a friend coming in from out of town who will be staying with me for the weekend. I'm going to a Dar Williams concert the night of the 23rd, which will be amazing (she's my favorite artist, and it's been a couple years since I've seen her live.) I'm really looking forward to that already!

One thing that has made this sooo much easier is that the weather is perfect. Generally Wisconsin doesn't even start to get a glimpse of spring until late April, but we're having some BEAUTIFUL weather here. We had a mild winter to begin with but it really feels like spring. As I write this, I'm sitting in front of the open window, it's 66 degrees and sunny. I just got done with a walk/jog that lasted almost an hour and I burned 680 calories! This is the third time I've gone walking/jogging this week, but I went a lot further than usual this time (I think). The whole route is only 3.6 miles, but it is HILLY. I jog when going downhill and on some flat surfaces and then I walk all the uphills and most flat surfaces. I used to be able to do this in about 40 minutes but now I'm up to 52 minutes. Oh well. I blame the hills :)

My only problem with running is that even though I stretch a lot and cool down, I still end up so ridiculously sore and I end up having to take a couple days off of working out. I know I just have to get used to it again.

So here is my menu plan for this week as well as my workout plan. I'm eating more meat this week than I usually do because I had a couple recipes I really wanted to try!